This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. Taking readers on a jo...

How the ruthless contest among Julius Caesar’s heirs ignited a global war that raged far beyond the borders of RomeThe succession of civil wars that plagued the last years of the Roman Republic has often been portrayed as a settling of scores between Roman factions—Sulla against Marius, Caesar against Pompey, Octavian against Mark Antony—with foreign campaigns serving as a backdrop to the tragic spectacle. The Roman World War recasts the struggle for Rome ...

The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne's empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture's birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.The Birt...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

Jordanes, also written Jordanis or (not common nowadays) Jornandes, was a 6th century Roman bureaucrat best known for writing histories. Jordanes wrote Romana about the history of Rome, but his best-known work is his Getica, written in Constantinople about AD 551. It is the only extant classical work dealing with the early history of the Goths. Jordanes was asked by a friend to write this book as a summary of a multi-volume history of the Goths (now lost) by the statesman Cassiodorus. He was ...

A military history of the campaigns of Stilicho, the army general who became one of the most powerful men in the Western Roman Empire.Flavius Stilicho lived in one of the most turbulent periods in European history. The Western Empire was finally giving way under pressure from external threats, especially from Germanic tribes crossing the Rhine and Danube, as well as from seemingly ever-present internal revolts and rebellions.Ian Hughes explains how a Vandal (...

J.B. Bury was a celebrated historian who wrote around the turn of the 19th century. His classics on the Roman Empire and Greece still stand among the best texts on the classical civilizations. The period between the 4th and 6th centuries A.D. was one of incredible upheaval for the Roman Empire. The West saw Rome sacked by invaders from the North, while the Eastern Empire flourished and saw much of the old Roman lands re-conquered during the conquests of Belisarius under Justinian I. Burys ...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE KANSAS CITY STARFrom Anthony Everitt, the bestselling author of acclaimed biographies of Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian*,* comes a riveting, magisterial account of Rome and its remarkable ascent from an obscure agrarian backwater to the greatest empire the world has ever known.Emerging as a market town from a cluster of hill villages in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Rome grew to become the anci...

A military history of the campaigns of Flavius Belisarius, the greatest general of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian.Back in the 6th century, Belisarius twice defeated the Persians and reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in a single year at the age of 29, before going on to regain Spain and Italy, including Rome (briefly), from the barbarians. This book discusses the evolution from classical Roman to Byzantine armies and systems of warfare, as we...

At the start of the first millennium AD, southern and western Europe formed part of the Mediterranean-based Roman Empire, the largest state western Eurasia has ever known, and was set firmly on a trajectory towards towns, writing, mosaics, and central heating. Central, northern and eastern Europe was home to subsistence farmers, living in wooden houses with mud floors, whose largest political units weighed in at no more than a few thousand people. By the year 1000, Mediterranean domination...

A magisterial work of gripping history, City of Fortune tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean - an epic five hundred year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure.In Venice, the path to empire unfolded in a series of extraordinary contests - the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, the fight to the finish with Genoa and a desperate defence against the Turks. Under th...

"Magnificently chronicles four significant years in the emperor's life . . . A splendid portrait [with] dazzling glimpses of Charlemagne's life and times." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)On Christmas morning in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed the crown of imperial Rome on the brow of a Germanic king named Karl. With one gesture, the man later hailed as Charlemagne claimed his empire and forever shaped the destiny of Europe. Becoming Charlemagne